Discovery Health

Senior Data Scientist

About Discovery 

Discovery’s core purpose is to make people healthier and to enhance and protect their lives. We seek out and invest in exceptional individuals who understand and support our core purpose, and whose own values align with those of Discovery. Our fast-paced and dynamic environment enables smart, self-driven people to be their best. As global thought leaders, Discovery is passionate about innovating to not only achieve financial success, but to ignite positive and meaningful change within our society.

About (Risk Intelligence)

The Risk Intelligence team is responsible for the measurement and reporting of clinical experience for each of our client schemes, providing actuarial analytic support for managed care interventions, healthcare quality public reporting initiatives, provider contracting, and clinical profile reports of clinician utilisation patterns and adherence to evidence based clinical process measures.

Key Purpose

In this role you will be involved in creating opportunities that delight our customers by leveraging Discovery’s vast clinical, demographic, and operational data. The successful applicant will be working within a highly specialized and growing team investigating ways to optimize and improve client services for Discovery’s client schemes. The successful candidate must be motivated, productive and work well within a team.

Areas of responsibility may include but not limited to

• Lead the design, development, and deployment of LLM - and generative AI-based solutions that address large-scale and complex problems and materially drive the company’s global product offerings and strategy forward.
• Collaborate with product owners, project managers, and executive stakeholders to identify and prioritize business problems that can be solved with LLMs.
• Conduct desktop research into the state-of-the-art in LLMs and Generative AI and apply findings to real-world applications (either requested by business or suggested by yourself).
• Conduct research and development of speech-to-text and audio-based language models, integrating with LLM pipelines where applicable.
• Conduct experimental research on the use of LLMs in real-world company applications to ensure that design and development decisions are made scientifically and optimize for and balance all business requirements. These include accuracy, scalability, efficiency, reliability, safety, and cost-effectiveness.
• Translate strategic direction into technical product definitions and roadmaps.
• Participate actively in internal and external communities discussing and designing policies for the ethical use of AI and ensure your team’s work meets ethical AI standards.
• Contribute substantially to a culture of innovation, leading the prototyping and development of novel methodologies and approaches. Provide strong thought leadership in this regard.
• Communicate complex technical concepts to executives and non-technical stakeholders effectively.
• Demonstrate strong emotional intelligence by understanding and uplifting team members and skillfully managing challenging situations with composure.
• Advise other teams in the business on best practice based on your experience.
• Mining large structured and unstructured datasets to find new insights to inform operational efficiency and ‘member- delight’ interaction strategies
• Research and application of the most up to date machine learning algorithms and AI techniques
• Present data and model findings in a way that provides actionable insights to business users
• Monitoring model performance

Personal Attributes and Skills

• Expert in data science programming languages such as R, Python, Scala
• Expert in data manipulation skills including SQL to extract, transform and load data
• Experience in interactive data exploration and data-driven story telling
• Understanding and application of Big Data and distributed computing principles (Hadoop and MapReduce)
• Hands on experience with Big Data systems will be preferred
• Strong analytical and statistical knowledge with an understanding of the latest machine learning algorithms for both structured and unstructured data
• Ability to formulate problem statements and develop a plan for tackling the problem
• Strong ability to communicate findings and recommendations from data (visual, verbal and written)
• Production environment machine learning and AI
• A passion for data exploration and complex healthcare environment
• Self-starter
• Willingness to learn and grow exponentially
• A restless curiosity towards data and uncovering unknown correlations
• Ability to work cohesively in a team environment and balance multiple priorities
• A team player who can work alone when required and without supervision
• High level of attention to detail, resilience, enthusiasm, energy and drive
• Positive, can-do attitude
• Ability to adapt to emerging technologies and tools
• Proficiency in version control systems such as Git for collaborative coding and maintaining code integrity
• Ethical and able to maintain confidentiality and manage boundaries
• Aligned to Discovery values and core purpose

Education and Experience

• Honours or Master’s degree in either Data Science, Statistics, or Applied Mathematics with some experience in software engineering, computer science or working with big disparate sets of data, OR
• Honours or Master’s degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering with solid experience in statistical modelling, data mining and machine learning
• Other analytical qualifications will also be considered if accompanied by the relevant experience
• A minimum of 3-5 years’ work experience in a data science position

Technical skills additional (advantageous)

• A clinical background or qualification (e.g., MBBCh/MD, Nursing, Pharmacy, or Allied Health).
• Deep understanding of clinical workflows, medical terminology, and healthcare coding systems (e.g., ICD-10, SNOMED-CT).
• Experience working with clinical datasets such as Electronic Health Records (EHR) or pathology reports.

EMPLOYMENT EQUITY   
                             
The Company’s approved Employment Equity Plan and Targets will be considered as part of the recruitment process. As an Equal Opportunities employer, we actively encourage and welcome people with various disabilities to apply.